In an oft-cited passage from Book 1 of Of the proficience and Advancement ofLearning (1605) Francis Bacon outlines what he calls the ‘three vanities inStudies, whereby learning hath been most traduced’: ‘fantastical learning’,‘contentious learning’, and ‘delicate learning, vaine Imaginations, vaine Alter-cations, & vaine affectations’. It is the last of these ‘vanities’ that concerns thesubject of this special issue, copiousness in early modern writing, as Baconidentifies ‘delicate learning’ and ‘vaine affectations’ with what he sees as theincreasing trend towards privileging copy over copia, a growing preference forloquacity over true eloquence. He traces this to four causes, all of which areadmirable in themselves, and all of which he sees as important elements in thenecessary reform of scholastic learning: ‘the admiration of ancient Authors’,‘the hate of the School-men’, ‘the exact studie of Languages’, and ‘theefficacie of Preaching’. Initially, he argues, these causes brought in ‘an affec-tionate studie of eloquence, and copie of speech, which then began to flour-ish’, but soon they led to a ‘distemper’:
[. . .]men began to hunt more after wordes, than matter, and more after thechoisenesse of the Phrase, and the round and cleane composition of the sen-tence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration oftheir workes with tropes and figures: then after the weight of matter, worth ofsubiect, soundnesse of argument, life of inuention, or depth of iudgement.1
As examples, he points first to ‘the flowing and watrie vaine’ of JerónimoOsorio da Fonseca, the Ciceronian Bishop of Silves, whose works were wellknown in England, primarily through Roger Ascham’s presentation of copiesof them to various members of the court, and then to the ‘infinite, and curiouspaines’ that the humanist schoolmaster Johannes Sturm devoted to Cicero inboth his own works and the curriculum that he drew up for his school at
1 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 2000), E2v–E3v (21–22).
Strasbourg.2 For Bacon, both Osorio and Sturm typify the age’s focus on‘copie’ rather than ‘weight’, and thus exemplify the first of the distempers thathis treatise seeks to reform: ‘when men studie words, and not matter’.
Bacon’s criticism here is not, however, a rejection of humanist learning andstyle; nor indeed is it a rejection of copious discourse. As Brian Vickers hasshown, Bacon’s comments echo many of the arguments that humanist peda-gogues themselves had made.3 Even Ascham himself, by the time of TheScholemaster (1570), had begun to criticize Osorio, disparaging in particularthe ‘fulnes’ of his style: the very feature that Bacon ridicules in The Advance-ment.4 Bacon’s comments also closely echo Philip Sidney’s remarks about whathe perceived as the deplorable, but widespread, use of shortcuts to elegantLatinity. ‘Truly, I could wish, if at least I might be so bold to wish in a thingbeyond the reach of my capacity,’ he wrote in The Defence of Poesy (c. 1580),‘[that] the diligent imitators of Tully and Demosthenes, most worthy to beimitated, did not so much keep Nizolian paper-books of their figures andphrases as, by attentive translation, as it were, devour them whole, and makethem wholly theirs.’5 His reference here to ‘Nizolian paper-books’ alludesboth to Mario Nizolio’s Thesaurus ciceronianus (1535), a popular dictionary ofCiceronian Latin, intended as a guide to composition and a shortcut toliterary style, and more generally to the humanist practice of commonplacing.Commonplace books, too, with their lists of figures and phrases, wereintended to provide a guide to composition and an aid to style. However, justas Bacon’s criticism in the Advancement is not of ‘eloquence, and copie ofspeech’ per se, so Sidney’s point is not that students should avoid Ciceronianstyle altogether. Rather, it is that if they use ‘Nizolian paper-books’, or theequivalent, they will never properly imitate it; they will never manage to digestit, transform it, and make it their own. Sidney’s comment is an intervention inliterary debates over the nature of imitation, but his argument is almost thesame as Bacon’s: an inclination towards ‘copie’ rather than ‘weight’; a focuson ‘words’ at the expense of ‘matter’.
2 For Ascham’s presentation of Osorio’s works to members of the English court, see Lawrence V. Ryan, RogerAscham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 208. Osorio and Sturm are not Bacon’s only examples: healso points to Nicholas Car, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Regius professor of Greek, and to Aschamhimself, whose ‘Lectures and Writings, almost deifie Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure, all young men that werestudious vnto that delicate and pollished kinde of learning’ (Advancement of Learning, E3v).
3 Brian Vickers, ‘The Myth of Francis Bacon’s “Anti-Humanism” ’, in Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone (eds.),Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 135–58.
4 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster Or plaine and perfite way of teaching children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, theLatin tong, but specially purposed for the priuate bringing vp of youth in Ientlemen and Noble mens houses, and commodiousalso for all such, as haue forgot the Latin tonge, and would by themselues, without à Scholemaster, in short tyme, and withsmall paines, recouer à sufficient habilitie, to vnderstand, write, and speake Latin (London: John Day, 1570), N4v. Hecomments shortly beforehand that while ‘fulnes . . . is not to be misliked in a yong man, so in farder aige, ingreater skill, and weightier affairs, it is to be temperated, or else discretion and iudgement shall seem to bewanting in him’ (N3v).
5 Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 2004), 49.
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Bacon’s comments in The Advancement also correspond with how mostclassical and Renaissance rhetoricians defined copia. They, too, deplored thisseparation of words from things and emphasized that true copiousnessdepended on both. As Terence Cave has argued, rhetoricians used the termprimarily in the context of the ‘fundamental duality of “things” (res) and“words” (verba)’, and believed the trope to be assured only ‘where res informor guarantee verba’.6 Classical and Renaissance rhetorical theory, therefore,invariably recommended the integration of the two, something epitomized byCicero’s formula for properly copious discourse in the De oratore: ‘a full supplyof facts begets a full supply of words, and if the subjects discussed are them-selves of an elevated character, this produces a spontaneous brilliance in thelanguage.’7 Furthermore, while copia was a signal quality of eloquence, andindeed was sometimes used as a synonym for it, as Cicero’s definition ofeloquence in the De partitione oratoria makes clear (‘eloquence is nothing elsebut wisdom delivering copious utterance’), it never just meant quantity orvolume of words.8 Indeed, that resulted in the opposite of true eloquence:loquacitas, the vice about which orators warned almost as often as they cel-ebrated the virtues of copia. Quintilian, for example, observes that ‘our goodteacher . . . will cut out all excessive verbosity, so that everything relevant to thetheme is said, but not (as some seem to want) everything in the whole wideworld,’ while elsewhere in the Institutes he has to check his own speech lest he‘fall into the very longwindedness’ he is ‘trying to avoid’.9
This interdependence of res and verba in the copious style found its mostfamous sixteenth-century expression in the title of the best known Renais-sance treatise on the subject: Erasmus’ De duplici copia verborum ac rerumcommentarii duo (1512).10 Furthermore, while the structure of this workappears to separate the two aspects, with Book 1 addressing copia verborum andBook 2 copia rerum, something that Erasmus justifies on pedagogical grounds,
6 Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1979), 5–6.
7 Cicero, De oratore, ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (Cambridge,MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1967; first published in this edition 1942), III. 31. 125: ‘rerum enimcopia verborum copiam gignit, et si est honestas in rebus ipsis de quibus dicitur, exsistit naturalis quidamsplendor in verbis.’ See also III. 5. 17 where Crassus introduces his argument that style is inseparable frommatter: ‘Nam cum omnis ex re atque verbis constet oratio, neque verba sedem habere possunt si rem subtraxerisneque res lumen si verba semoveris.’
8 Cicero, De partitione oratoria, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, and London:Harvard University Press, 1942), 23. 79: ‘Nihil enim est aliud eloquentia nisi copiose loquens sapientia.’
9 Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols. (Cam-bridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10. 5. 22 and 5. 10. 91.
10 For an English iteration of Erasmus’ argument, see Gabriel Harvey’s 1576 lecture on Ciceronian rhetoric.In this lecture Harvey reminds his students to ‘[p]ay attention not only to the brilliant greenery of words, butmore to the ripe fruit of meaning and reasoning’ and to ‘[u]nite dialectic and knowledge with rhetoric’; he alsoexhorts them to ‘[l]earn from Erasmus to keep an abundance of words with an abundance of matters’ (GabrielisHarveii Ciceronianvs, Vel Oratio post reditum, habita Cantabrigiæ ad suos Auditores (London: Henry Bynneman,1577), F2v–F3r). For a discussion of the impact of Erasmian theories of copia on humanist education and the‘coming of age’ of English eloquence, see Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature(Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 41–58.
Introduction 169
he admits that the trope cannot really be divided in this way. As he puts it inChapter 7 of Book 1, ‘[i]t might be thought that these two aspects are sointerconnected in reality that one cannot easily separate one from the other,and that they interact so closely that any distinction between them belongs totheory rather than practice.’11 However, despite this interdependence, therewas also an important hierarchy here: something about which rhetoricaltheory was equally clear. Matter should always come first, as Quintilian’sfamous advice on the care that orators should take over the two illustrates:‘Therefore, I would have the orator, while careful in his choice of words, beeven more concerned about his subject matter. For, as a rule, the best wordsare essentially suggested by the subject matter and are discovered by their ownintrinsic light.’12 Erasmus made a similar point at the beginning of the Deratione studii ac legendi interpretandique auctores (1512), the brief outline of hisscheme of humanistic learning and his foundation text for the curriculum atthe newly established St Paul’s School in London. He argues there that‘knowledge as a whole seems to be of two kinds, of things and words.’ Of these,he adds, ‘[k]nowledge of words comes earlier, but that of things is the moreimportant.’13 Bacon’s comments in the Advancement suggest that he sharedthese views; that he recognized the Ciceronian interdependence of words andthings, but that, like Erasmus and Quintilian, he also afforded priority to thelatter. The ‘distemper’ identified in The Advancement occurs when the oppositehappens, when words are separated from things and given priority over them.The result is ‘copie’, with all the pejorative connotations of that word, ratherthan copia or copiousness.
Bacon’s argument is therefore aligned with classical and humanist rhetori-cal theory, in regard to both the relationship between verba and res and thequestion of copiousness. And yet his comments also signal an anxiety aboutthose positions and an awareness of a growing divorce between truly copiousdiscourse, as defined by classical rhetoric, and what was increasingly the casein early modern writing. Bacon’s comments therefore offer a particularlyuseful starting point for this special issue, as they look back to the sixteenth-century humanist concept of copia and understanding of the relationshipbetween verba and res, but also anticipate the shift in all three terms that wouldoccur over the course of the seventeenth century.14 That shift would culminatein Thomas Sprat’s call for the reform of discourse and the introduction of apurified and shortened language, shorn of all ‘luxury and redundance’, and
11 Desiderius Erasmus, De copia/De ratione studii, trans. Betty I. Knott, in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig R.Thompson, Vol. 24 (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 301.
12 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 8. proem. 20–21: ‘Curam ergo verborum rerum volo esse sollicitudinem.Nam plerumque optima rebus cohaeret et cernuntur suo lumine.’
13 Erasmus, De ratione studii, 666.14 For a useful overview of the changing history of res and verba in the seventeenth century, see A. C. Howell,
‘Res et Verba: Words and Things’, in Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Stanley E. Fish (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1971), 187–99.
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thus made fit for natural philosophy.15 For Sprat, extravagant style is the‘profest enemy’ of science, and the only solution is the ‘Remedy’ that heattributes to the Royal Society: ‘a constant Resolution, to reject all the ampli-fications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitivepurity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equalnumber of words.’16 Sprat’s vision here seems to close down the kind of verbalexuberance that we associate with copia and, indeed, with so much earlymodern writing, from the inexhaustible plenitude of Rabelais to theeuphuism of Lyly and the comic coinages of Nashe. It also, of course, seeks toclarify once and for all the sometimes vexed relationship between res andverba, to make the correspondence as precise as possible by removing allverbiage: something that Swift brilliantly ridicules in the ‘School of Lan-guages’ in Book 3 of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and the professors’ absurd‘Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever’. Discourse in this‘School’ is certainly not copious. The problem is that the school requires ‘allMen to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the par-ticular Business they are to discourse on.’ As Gulliver observes, this means that‘if a Man’s Business be very great, and of various Kinds, he must be obliged inProportion to carry a greater Bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he canafford one or two strong Servants to attend him.’ Gulliver’s description of thescheme then ends with the preposterous and bathetic vision of ‘two of thoseSages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us;who when they met in the Streets would lay down their Loads, open theirSacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together.’17 Their scheme is bothliterally and metaphorically burdensome.
CONTINUED COPIA: COMPOSING A SHIFTING HISTORY
The narrative here from Erasmus to Sprat, from copia to brevitas, from theexuberance of the sixteenth century to the plain style of the seventeenth, is afamiliar one in both literary history and the history of science. And yet, as thearticles in this special issue show, both individually and collectively, that storyis not as straightforward as scholars have sometimes thought. Copiousness,and indeed also the rhetorical trope of copia, did not disappear with theseventeenth century and the rise of scientific writing, the foundation of theRoyal Society, and the language reform described in Sprat’s History. Copiouswriting continued to be important and discourse that married copia rerum andcopia verborum in the Ciceronian ideal continued to be produced. As ClairePreston demonstrates in her article, nowhere is this more apparent than in the
15 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London, For the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London:T[homas] R[oycroft] for J. Martyn, 1667), 111.
16 Ibid., 113.17 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. David Womersley, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 270–2.
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writing of Thomas Browne. In examining Browne’s neologisms, she revealsthe astonishing lexical ingenuity of a scientifically inclined writer faced withthe problem of describing a particular in the natural world, in this case thequincunx, and shows how in order to meet what she calls ‘the empiricalrequirement for a supple and copious descriptive discourse’ Browne had torely on precisely the kind of verbal ‘extravagance’ and luxurious language thatSprat disavows.18 If, as her statistics suggest, the degree to which Brownecoined new words was unusual, his linguistic facility and rhetorical schoolingwere nonetheless much more typical: something that the other articles in thisvolume suggest as together they explore the various metaphors used by dif-ferent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers to figure the processes ofknowledge production and knowledge compilation.
Nevertheless, concepts of copia did shift in the early modern period. As thisvolume shows, by the end of the seventeenth century copia had begun to beassociated as much with compilations of knowledge as with rhetoric, imagina-tive writing, and the language arts. Here, it is useful to revisit the variousmeanings of copiousness and the different etymologies of copia so brilliantlytraced by Terence Cave in the opening pages of his magisterial 1979 study TheCornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance.19 Early modernusages of the word reveal that copiousness described a very large semanticfield, one far beyond the world of rhetoric suggested by its Latin origins.According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary meaning of ‘copious’was ‘Furnished plentifully with anything; having or yielding an abundantsupply of; abounding in’, which reveals how open-ended the word and itscognates really were in the early modern period.20 Copiousness could describeanything. It could be a quality of speech and language, but also of matter andknowledge.
Indeed, some of the earliest usages of ‘copious’ in English apply not towords, but to things, and to information rather than to style. John Trevisa, forexample, in his translation of Book 1 of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon (1387),notes that Britain is ‘noble copious and ryche of noble Welles and Ryuers withplente of Fysshe’, and records that in Wales ‘[t]here lyme is copious/ Andslattes for hows’.21 Copiousness here is not being used – or, at least, notprimarily – in the qualitative sense associated with rhetoric, but in a quanti-tative sense. The two are, of course, not necessarily opposed: the fact thatBritain is ‘copious and ryche’ is connected with its nobility, rhetoricallythrough Trevisa’s tricolon and his repetition, and therefore does serve astestimony to the virtues of the island that this part of the Polychronicon cel-ebrates. Nonetheless, the example shows how wide the understanding of copiawas at the beginning of the period with which this volume is concerned as well
18 p. 299.19 Cave, Cornucopian Text, 3–5.20 Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), s.v. ‘copious’, adj. 1.21 Ranulf Higden, Prolicionycion [sic] (London: William Caxton, 1482), liijr and xlixr.
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as at the end, and thus also reminds us of the complexity of the relationshipbetween a rhetorically defined concept of copia, the one that is most familiarto scholars today, and other notions of copiousness that also existed and wereperhaps equally important in the early modern period.
Furthermore, by the end of the seventeenth century, ‘copious’ had alsostarted to be used more narrowly as a designator of number and volume, as amarker of quantity as much as quality, with writers applying it to objects ratherthan words. John Ray in The Wisdom of God (1691) speaks of seawater ‘contain-ing a copious Salt manifest to Sense’, an observation on the degree of itssalinity, while Raphael in Book 7 of Paradise Lost, recounting the third day ofthe Creation, speaks of the ‘stately Trees . . . hung with copious Fruit’.22 InRay’s observation, in particular, copiousness has lost the affirmative senseformerly associated with it, the assertions of affluence, power, and fluencydescribed by Cave that are so crucial to its rhetorical valence, and is simply amatter of fact.23 Milton’s lines are testimony to the extraordinary fecundity ofthe prelapsarian world, and so do carry some of those assertions in the trope,but his use, too, is primarily enumerative rather than evaluative. This enu-merative sense is also suggested by Gilbert Burnet’s description of the StatePaper Office in the 1670s as ‘a copious and certain Repertory for those thatare to write our History ever since the Papers of State were laid up there’: ausage that, given its archival context, reminds us, once again, that copiousnesscould describe information as well as discourse.24
Of course, writers did continue to use ‘copious’ and its cognates in the waythat classical rhetoricians had done. Many of the early modern uses of theword incorporate res and verba in precisely the way that Cicero, Quintilian, andErasmus prescribed. Thomas Hoby, for example, in his translation ofBaldassare Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528), argues that the courtiershould be ‘more then indyfferentlye well seene, at the leaste in those studyes,which they call Humanitie’ because they ‘shall make him copyous, and (asAristippus aunswered that Tiran) bould to speake vppon a good grounde wytheuerye manne.’25 Castiglione’s vision here of what the courtier should study,Latin and Greek literature, signals his humanism, but so too does his concept
22 John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (London: Samuel Smith, 1691), 43; andJohn Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Longman, 1998; first published1968), VII. 324–5.
23 Cave, Cornucopian Text, 3. For the rise of the fact in the seventeenth century, see inter alia Barbara Shapiro,Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Science, Religion, History,Law and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); ead., A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1700(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Lorraine Daston, ‘Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistoryof Objectivity’, Annals of Scholarship, 8 (1991), 337–63; and Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems ofKnowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
24 Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England. In Two Parts (London: T[homas]H[odgkin] for Richard Chiswell, 1681), II. 121; quoted in Nicholas Popper, ‘From Abbey to Archive: ManagingTexts and Records in Early Modern England’, Archival Science, 10 (2010), 249–66 (at 250).
25 The Covrtyer of Covnt Baldessar Castilio diuided into foure bookes. Very necessary and profitable for yonge Gentilmenand Gentilwomen abiding in Court, Palaice, or Place, done into Englyshe by Thomas Hoby (London: William Seres,1561), H3v–H4r.
Introduction 173
of copia: one that exemplifies the Ciceronian ideal of the marriage of wordsand things. In a similar way, albeit in the context of religious polemic ratherthan humanist pedagogy, William Prynne speaks of ‘[o]ur learned DiuinitieProfessors in King Edwards dayes’ being ‘full and copious’.26 Prynne’s point isthat these ‘Professors’ were persuasive and convincing precisely because theywere well informed and offered ample matter as well as fulsome words. AndShakespeare, too, reminds us of the Ciceronian ideal, when in Richard III (c.1592–3) the Duchess of York exhorts Queen Elizabeth to ‘be not tongue-tied’and to ‘[b]e copious in exclaims’.27
Tracing this shifting history, and uncovering the relationship between theclassical sense of copia and other concepts of copiousness that were emergingat the time, is one of the key aims of The Copious Text. Here, we thereforedepart from Cave’s groundbreaking study: aside from Bacon, the other, andmost obvious, starting point for this special issue. Our debt (and indeedhomage) to The Cornucopian Text is signalled by our title, and we could nothave put this volume together without Cave’s exemplary exploration of thetrope in both Renaissance theory and practice. However, whereas Cave isconcerned primarily with imaginative writing, The Copious Text seeks to expandthat purview by also incorporating, but not substituting, histories of knowl-edge. Our intention is not thereby to suggest an either/or approach; such abifurcation would surely miss the point of copiousness and the crucial inter-dependence of words and things. But we do want to bring together differenttypes of writing and different genres, to examine copiousness across a wholerange of disciplines and discourses, from rhetoric and popular prose tonatural philosophy, heresiology, and history. This approach is valuable pre-cisely because it reveals parallels between texts that are, on the face of it, verydifferent. It is also valuable because it reminds us that the history of copious-ness – appropriately enough – defies any kind of totalizing or universal nar-rative. The range of textual practices in The Copious Text is thereforecorrespondingly (and necessarily) large. So, too, is the range of authors, as webegin with Erasmus, the touchstone for any history of early modern copious-ness, but end with John Aubrey, an author whose notes and manuscriptsare extensive, voluminous, and undoubtedly copious – but in somethingapproaching our modern sense of the word rather than the rhetoricallyinflected sense understood by Erasmus. Indeed, by the time that we come toAubrey, we do not really have copia at all: something that Kate Bennett nicelycaptures in her framing anecdote about certain Oxford scholars condemningAubrey (and also his friend Anthony à Wood) for not having a consistentimitative strategy or rhetorical structure. But Aubrey clearly does have animportant place in the history of copiousness. Copious, after all, as the OED
26 William Prynne, The Church of Englands Old Antithesis to New Arminianisme (London: [Augustine Mathewesand Elizabeth Allde for Michael Sparke], 1629), 68–9.
27 William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2009), IV. iv.132–5.
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attests, could also just mean ‘[m]ultitudinous’ or ‘numerous’.28 Aubrey’smanuscript remains are undoubtedly both of those things.
COPIOUSNESS AND THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA: THE MATERIAL TEXT
Examining the connection between copiousness and encyclopaedic writing isour second aim. The term encyclopaedia, originally believed to derive fromthe Greek for ‘circle of learning’, but considered by modern scholars to derivefrom an alternative expression that designated ‘common knowledge’ or‘general education’, has a natural correlation with copiousness.29 Most com-monly associated with texts such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica in themodern era, the term was affixed to English titles for the first time in theseventeenth century.30 While, as Ann Blair notes, it is disingenuous to talk ofencyclopaedias as if they were a coherent genre in the early modern period,nonetheless many writers sought to achieve a form of comprehensive compi-lation that acts as a precursor to the modern format. It is equally reasonable,as she also observes, ‘to speak of encyclopedic ambition as a central ingredientof the Renaissance obsession with accumulating information’.31 Anne LakePrescott has pointed to Pierre de La Primaudaye’s L’Academie Francaise (1577)as one such example, describing this huge collection of moral learning, whichtravels from the microcosm of human experience to the macrocosm of thecosmos, as a ‘quasi-encyclopaedia’.32 Similarly, Peter Burke places encyclopae-dic texts, such as those compiled by Giorgio Valla and Heinrich Alsted,alongside curricula and libraries in an ‘intellectual tripod’ which formed thefoundation of early modern learning, thereby linking the format explicitly toscholastic models of knowledge dissemination.33 Burke associates theincreased interest in encyclopaedic texts in this period with the ‘crisis inknowledge’ produced by New World discoveries and the rise of the printingpress.34 The resulting desire for order amidst a proliferation of newly availableinformation consequently had a huge impact upon scholarly texts and led to
28 OED, s.v. ‘copious’, adj. 3(b).29 For a history of the term, see Robert L. Fowler, ‘Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems’, in
Peter Binkley (ed.), Pre-modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second Comers Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July1996 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 3–29.
30 Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 94. Asecond volume on this theme looks at knowledge systems from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, ASocial History of Knowledge II (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
31 Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 2010), 12. See Jason König and Greg Woolf (eds.), Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renais-sance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) for studies of the rhetoric and techniques of compre-hensive compilation before the Enlightenment.
32 Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Pierre de La Primaudaye’s French Academy: Growing Encyclopaedic’, in Neil Rhodesand Jonathan Sawday (eds.), The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London:Routledge, 2000), 158.
33 Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, 82.34 Ibid., 109.
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an increased interest in information management.35 However, this impetus tocontain and manage a seemingly overwhelming and chaotic body of knowl-edge, what Kathryn Murphy identifies in her article as the ‘boon’ and the‘bane’ of the polymath,36 was not confined simply to the scholarly arena, andwe will argue in this special issue that encyclopaedic thinking was indicative ofa range of different texts and practices, from religious literature, antiquarianhistories and natural philosophy, to novella collections. In parallel, we will alsoargue that while copiousness and encyclopaedism are not the same thing, andcertainly were not the same thing in the early modern period, they were muchmore closely aligned by the end of the seventeenth century than they hadbeen previously.
Nonetheless, despite attempts in the early modern period to formulate anencyclopaedic approach to knowledge gathering, encyclopaedic books, asBrian Cummings notes in his article, remain ‘a paradox rather than a para-digm’.37 The ideal of a total body of knowledge was, in the attempt, revealedas an impossibility. Consequently, the ways in which writers wrestled with theproblems of collecting, compiling, and organizing information in encyclopae-dic books were as discursive as their subject matter and the resulting textsoften defied classification. Inevitably, these texts were not only large in scopebut physically voluminous, often produced in large folio editions and/orrunning to multiple volumes. They also frequently went through multipleeditions as more information was added by accretion, as was the case withErasmus’ ever-growing Adagiorum chiliades, William Camden’s Britannia(1586), and Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613), texts examinedhere by Brian Cummings, Angus Vine, and Matthew Dimmock respectively.38
The organization of these large texts necessitated careful collaboration witha printer to ensure that they remained user-friendly despite their intimidatingsize and complicated publishing histories. From the choice of typeface andthe incorporation of images, to the use of alphabetization, the material con-stitution of the copious text had a huge impact on how information waspresented and then utilized by the reader. Furthermore, the use ofparatextual features such as contents pages, running titles, and indexesensured that readers were encouraged to actively engage with the text by‘finding’ the most appropriate or sententious information for their purposes.Thomas N. Corns hypothesizes that these finding systems offered ‘morespatial ways of thinking and of reading, and of relating one level of discourse
35 Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 294. See also Blair, TooMuch to Know.
36 p. 281.37 See p. 185. For a useful discussion of the ‘anxiety of variety’ experienced in the early modern period and
how this informed a turn to experience in the humanist disciplines, see Kathryn Murphy, ‘The Anxiety ofVariety: Knowledge and Experience in Montaigne, Burton and Bacon’, in Yota Batsaki, Subha Mukherji andJan-Melissa Schramm (eds.), Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),110–30.
38 For the accretive history of the Adagia, see also Margaret Mann Phillips, The ‘Adages’ of Erasmus: A Study withTranslations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
176 Abigail Shinn and Angus Vine
to other levels’ than the ‘flat text’ and would have caught the attention of thebrowsing reader in St Paul’s churchyard.39 Corns highlights how the variousstrategies employed by encyclopaedic texts when organizing their contentswere not confined to scholarly works but were also utilized by the writers andprinters of works with a popular readership, an argument echoed by AbigailShinn in her article on William Painter’s storybook collection the Palace ofPleasure (1566 and 1567).
COMMONPLACING AND THE COPIOUS READER
The use of these paratextual features by encyclopaedic books, combined withthe breadth and scope of their content, ensured that they promoted particularkinds of reading habits. In particular, they drew upon the practice ofcommonplacing promoted by the study of rhetoric. Commonplace books,which took the form of collections of useful quotations, were themselves aform of encyclopaedic writing as they sought to gather and frame sententiousexempla under loci communes or ‘places’. In the words of Ann Moss, thecommonplace book acted as an ‘information retrieval system’ for those tryingto organize and make sense of the new plethora of printed material.40 Com-monplace books could be personal manuscript collections, schoolroom exer-cises, or formalized in print. They were a ubiquitous textual form and theircomposition, Mary Thomas Crane argues, not only ‘shaped the theory ofdiscourse’ in the early modern period but also ‘shaped human subjects’.41 Thecommonplace book, much like the classical understanding of copia, would gointo decline by the end of the seventeenth century. The form was placedunder pressure by new methods of intellectual inquiry that privileged empiri-cism, as well as a growing aesthetic of uniformity inimical to its qualities ofopen ended abundance. Nonetheless, the commonplace tradition was embed-ded in European habits of thought and remained a ‘working tool’ for writerswell into the eighteenth century – most pertinently in the development of themodern encyclopaedia.42 However, while the production of copious texts hadan umbilical link to the action of commonplacing, as their writers looked tonumerous sources and authorities during their composition, the reader wasalso expected to apply the same method when digesting the completed text.Commonplacing therefore encouraged a method of reading that shaded into
39 Thomas N. Corns, ‘The Early Modern Search Engine: Indices, Title Pages, Marginalia and Contents’, inThe Renaissance Computer, 97.
40 Ann Moss, Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1996), v. See also Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, ‘Introduction’, in The Renaissance Computer, 12–13.
41 Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1993), 52.
42 Moss, Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, 276. On the relationshipbetween the commonplace book and the eighteenth-century encyclopaedia see Richard Yeo, ‘Ephraim Cham-bers’ Cyclopaedia (1728) and the Commonplace Tradition’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 57 (1996), 157–75. Yeo’sargument develops a series of observations by Sister Joan Marie Lechner in Renaissance Concepts of the Common-places (New York: Pageant, 1962).
Introduction 177
invention, a creative use of text that was self-perpetuating and potentiallyinexhaustive.43 This fragmentary and imitative reading process is encouragedby many of the texts examined in this special issue. This is because theircopiousness lends itself to purposive and productive ‘use’ via their organizingsystems and the material text’s promotion of what Peter Stallybrass calls‘discontinuous reading’.44 The copiousness of their style and content is con-sequently mirrored by the discursive potential of their afterlife within widercultures of knowledge. Encyclopaedic thinking and what Lorna Hutson termsthe ‘commonplace habit’ therefore had a huge impact upon the early modernapplication of the theory of copia and copiousness to both the material textand the reader, themes which form the backdrop to the discussions of copi-ousness framed by the articles in this special issue.45
METAPHOR AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE
One of the prevailing themes of this issue is the use of metaphor as anorganizing principle in copious texts. The wax tablet, the storehouse, and thepalace are familiar metaphors for memory practices, as has been discussed inthe magisterial Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers.46 These container meta-phors are accompanied in scholarly works by the organizing of knowledgeinto ‘fields’ and ‘trees’.47 So pervasive and ubiquitous is the metaphorical castto knowledge systems in human history that Douwe Draaisma argues thatparticular metaphors act as ‘guide fossils’ to different periods.48 Similar meta-phors are utilized by many of the writers addressed in this special issue,although they frequently have the capacity to invoke both flexibility anddilation as well as containment. For example, Guido Giglioni in his study ofBacon’s silva argues that Bacon uses the forest as an image for systems ofknowledge gathering because it is loose enough to be heuristically productive.This looseness allows for a positive reading of both getting lost and beingrestless as a means of gaining insight. Similarly, Abigail Shinn’s study proposesthat Painter’s use of the image of the palace implies that the individualnovellas within his collection act as furnishings which can be accessed andmoved depending upon the whim of the reader, thereby (ostensibly) achiev-ing a form of customized moral physic. The comprehensiveness to whichcopious texts aspired was also figured through metaphor. For example, as
43 On commonplacing transforming reading into invention, see Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 46.
44 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer(eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2002), 42.
45 Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, 46.46 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990; repr. 2008).47 Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, 86.48 Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4.
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Kathryn Murphy notes, Robert Burton conjured the image of Minerva’s towerin order to describe the synoptic vision that defined his idea of polymathy.Similarly, as Angus Vine foregrounds in his article, William Camden used thelanguage of restoration, collaboration, and conversation when formulating hisantiquarian survey of Britain, the Britannia. Given that metaphor has thecapacity to give meaning to the intangible by bolstering the vividness orenargeia of descriptive language it is unsurprising that it is wielded by writerslooking to manage an abundance of knowledge which is often in danger ofexceeding its bounds. The variety of metaphors applied to the organization ofcopiousness by these writers, however, also testifies to the creativity and fluid-ity of approaches to information management in the early modern period. Itis this creativity which The Copious Text aims to highlight by proposing thattheories of copiousness permeated a variety of textual forms and had far-reaching consequences for how both writers and readers organized, digested,adapted, and disseminated knowledge.
PRINT: FRAMING THE COPIOUS TEXT
Another of the prevailing themes of this issue is print culture. All but one ofthe articles here concern printed books. We are not the first to connectcopiousness with the rise of print culture: Cave, for example, suggests that theurge to write in the sixteenth century, and the urge to write prolifically, was‘[s]timulated by the success of the printing trade’.49 Nor are we the first to linkthe transformation in encyclopaedic books in the early modern period to thepress. Elizabeth Eisenstein, for example, has drawn attention to how theinvention of mechanical reproduction enabled compilers to produce moreaccurate and better-illustrated collections of knowledge, while RobertDarnton has revealed the extraordinary economic benefits that could accrueto publishers and printers of encyclopaedias and the equally extraordinarylengths to which some went in order to capitalize on this.50 Eisenstein’s testcase is Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, an encyclopaedic description of theworld first published in 1544, which went through eight editions in its author’slifetime and thirty-five more by 1628. As she notes, ‘each edition becamebigger, more crammed with data, and more profusely illustrated.’ Darntonbuilds his case around the greatest of all pre-modern encyclopaedias:Diderot’s Grande Encyclopédie (1751–2). His focus is not, however, on thepublishers of the original edition, but on two individuals associated with thecheaper (and much more lucrative) quarto editions of the 1770s: the Parisianbusinessman Charles Panckoucke, the so-called ‘Atlas’ of the French booktrade, and the indomitable Lyon bookseller Joseph Duplain. The value of
49 Cave, Cornucopian Text, ix.50 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations
in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 109; and Robert Darnton, ‘TheEncyclopédie Wars of Prerevolutionary France’, American Historical Review, 78 (1973), 1,331–52.
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these quartos to the book trade, and indeed to the French economy as awhole, is attested by both the sheer number of copies produced – 8,000 sets ofthirty-nine volumes each – and the astonishing sums generated. The SociétéTypographique de Neuchâtel reckoned the whole revenue of the business at2,454,092 livres and the gross profit at 1,336,738 livres. As Darnton points out,this was ‘a return of one hundred twenty per cent on expenditures’.51 Thus,when Panckoucke observed in a letter to the Société that ‘[t]he success of thisquarto edition passes all belief’, he was not exaggerating. Nor were membersof the Société when a year later they described the project as ‘the mostbeautiful ever to be done in publishing’.52
The economic and intellectual benefits outlined by Darnton and Eisensteincome together in another text that neatly illustrates the conflation of copi-ousness and print technology in the early modern period: Domenico NaniMirabelli’s Polyanthea (1503).53 Nani’s book is an example of a florilegium, agenre that was common in the Middle Ages, but that exploded in popularityin the early modern period in the wake of the invention of printing. Florilegiawere collections of sentences, books that were themselves copious (althoughnot necessarily big), but also intended to engender copiousness in theirreaders. First published in 1503, the Polyanthea appeared in at least forty-fourdifferent editions by 1686, with additions that augmented the text from some430,000 words in the first edition to more than 2.5 million by the earlyseventeenth century.54 The contrast here with one of Nani’s models andsources, Thomas of Ireland’s early fourteenth-century Manipulus florum, isinstructive. Where the Polyanthea was truly massive and incorporated materialfar beyond theology, Thomas’s florilegium was limited to theological andmoral sayings gathered from classical and patristic sources. Furthermore, hisnumbers of sentences and words were also much smaller: some 6,000 extracts,totalling tens of thousands of words rather than hundreds. Print was one ofthe enabling factors here, as lowered costs of production made longer bookssuch as the Polyanthea much more commercially viable. Furthermore,although early modern printers rarely kept standing type, except for shortbooks, it also made books easier to expand in the accretive way describedabove.55 In the case of the Polyanthea those expansions were driven by com-mercial as much as intellectual reasons. Nani’s book was immediately popularand its success was widespread, and it soon had readers across Europe. Afterthe first edition, published at Savona by Francisco de Silva, the next fiveeditions emerged from four of the principal printing centres of the early
51 Ibid., 1,337.52 Charles Panckoucke to the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, 9 September 1777, and the Société
Typographique de Neuchâtel to Charles Panckoucke, 20 August 1778; quoted in Darnton, ‘Encyclopédie Wars’,1,335 and 1,337.
53 For the Polyanthea and its astonishing publication history, see Blair, Too Much to Know, 174–88.54 Ibid., 125.55 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1995), 116–7.
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modern period: Venice (1507 and 1508), Basle (1512), Paris (1512), and Lyon(1513).56
If the shifts in concepts and practices of copia that this special issue traces arethus unimaginable without the rise of print culture, we nonetheless also seekto complicate that picture somewhat. Even in the age of mechanical repro-duction, we suggest, compilation of big books depended on the resources ofmanuscript as well as print. Erasmus reminds us of this when in the De copia helays out his guidelines for commonplace books: the means by which hisreaders ‘may acquire an ample supply of examples’ and thus also producecopious discourse.57 So too does the kind of user-generated content thatAngus Vine describes in his article on the Britannia, which would also havebeen impossible without the resources of manuscript. Print technology facili-tated the kind of collaborative authorship that the Britannia embodies, andundoubtedly gave readers a new importance in the production of copiousbooks, but manuscript was still needed to put that collaboration into practice.Anne Lake Prescott has also drawn attention to the significance of user-generated content in her work on English readers of de La Primaudaye,showing how they added to, marked, and customized their copies of The FrenchAcademie with a range of manuscript notes. Mostly these were organizationalmarks made by readers to help them navigate their way through the text, butoccasionally they were also accretions, adding to or commenting on the stockof information that de La Primaudaye had already compiled.58
Copious texts in the early modern period, in other words, depended onboth paper technologies; on manuscript and print. Our perspective in thisspecial issue is therefore less the revolutionary model associated withEisenstein and more the kind of accommodation between the two mediadescribed by David McKitterick. As he argues, we need to think about printand manuscript ‘not as replacements for one another, but as having joint andinterdependent existence’; we need to recognize that ‘one does not whollydrive out the other’.59 This methodology goes some way to explaining theapparent paradox of ending The Copious Text not with print culture, not withDiderot or one of his antecedents, but with an author almost none of whoseworks were printed in his lifetime.60 By moving from Erasmus to Aubrey wehope to show that the history of early modern copiousness was not onlythe story of the triumph of print. Writing and knowledge could be copious
56 Blair, Too Much to Know, 182.57 Erasmus, De copia, 636.58 Prescott, ‘Growing Encyclopaedic’, 162–3.59 David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 22. See also Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–57, for further influential remarks on the polarization of print andmanuscript in many histories of printing.
60 The only one of Aubrey’s works to be printed before his death was his Miscellanies (1696).
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without being printed, even if the press did unquestionably make thecompilation, production, and dissemination of copious texts much morestraightforward.
There is another reason, too, for ending with Aubrey, and that reasonreturns us to where we began: Bacon’s anxiety about the increasing separationof words from things and the implications of this for copious discourse. By thetime that we get to Aubrey, that separation is almost complete – but not in theway that worried Bacon. As Kate Bennett argues, with Aubrey, ‘it was thecontent, not the form, which prevailed.’ ‘[W]hatever notional genre or struc-ture he employed,’ she notes, ‘Aubrey forced it apart to add more and moreto it.’61 This is not copious discourse as Cicero, Quintilian, or Erasmus imag-ined it. But nor is it the kind of excessive fullness that Bacon disparages. Thisis not a man hunting ‘more after wordes, than matter’, but the opposite.Ending with Aubrey is therefore a reminder that copiousness does have ahistory, and a history that is worth exploring.
We make no claims that the history we offer here is comprehensive. Genresthat we barely discuss, but that have a clear relation to our subject, includebotany nd lexicography.62 Authors that we might have discussed, but do not,include Topsell, Florio, and Foxe. But, then, if the encyclopaedia is unable –and was never able – to contain the knowledge that its early modern andEnlightenment compilers hoped, and the dream of universal knowledge wasrevealed to be just that, a single issue of a modern-day academic journal haseven less chance. What we can offer is a representative sample: a collection ofarticles that range over a variety of texts, chronologically and generically, todemonstrate how pervasive and broad concepts of copiousness were in thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries – not literature or science, but literatureand science; not reader or writer, but reader and writer; not words or things,but words and things, sometimes in conjunction with one another, sometimesnot.
61 p. 324.62 See Brian W. Ogilvie, ‘Encyclopaedism in Renaissance Botany: From Historia to Pinax’, in Pre-modern
Encyclopaedic Texts, 89–99; and John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making ofHeritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
